The project assesses the feasibility of implementing TRANSIMS to accomplish regional transportation modeling in North Carolina. The main objectives of the study are: Assess the state-of-art of TRANSIMS development; Assess the resource requirements necessary to apply TRANSIMS; Estimate advantages and disadvantages, costs and benefits of doing a TRANSIMS study; Facilitate a possible future implementation of TRANSIMS in North Carolina
The report summarizes TRANSIMS technology, data and resource requirements, and typical output results. To gauge TRANSIMS resource requirements for a case study application, the researchers examined the City of Fayetteville and neighboring Fort Bragg Army base. In order to demonstrate TRANSIMS and compare it to traditional techniques, the research team developed interesting analogs with CORSIM and Transplan for corridor and area-traffic analysis. An Internet-based assessment tool generalizes the benefits and resource requirements of TRANSIMS for the Fayetteville-Fort Bragg case study, and summarizes the project findings. The research finds that Fayetteville and Fort Bragg offer excellent technical opportunities to test prototype TRANSIMS methodology. However, personnel availability and other resource obligations at NCDOT necessitate deferring implementation of TRANSIMS to a future time.
Regarding the TRANSIMS EDP the following recommendations are made:
- North Carolina should not develop a TRANSIMS EDP grant application until NCDOT management approves budget and other resource expectations.
- The Fayetteville Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) should have high priority as an EDP candidate.
- NCDOT should make the results of this project available to other North Carolina MPO's so that they can gauge the utility of TRANSIMS.
